I'm not aware of a time when Apple pushed a software update (silently or otherwise) to defeat security for a user (or users). Can you provide a reference?
I don't know what people expect. These moves are good things and everyone is whatabouting situations that there is 0 evidence has ever happened or would ever happen. It's unfalsifiable, impractical, and honestly just annoying.
If government were to compromise end to end encryption in the manner described above, it would either be visible when used to prosecute people, or invisible because it would never be used to prosecute people (but presumably for intelligence purposes). Even if it were used for intelligence purposes through the method above, which I don't think is at all established, it would still be a significant improvement over having data in a form that is actively used to prosecute people.
The snowden revelations were precisely about information gathering for intelligence purposes. The vast majority of intel gathering is not for prosecutionary purposes.
What is absolutely good is that they have e2ee now, and the only way they could even hypothetically open a back door would be one that was completely secret, for the government, which definitionally closes off a whole class of government use of the data, for example in domestic prosecutions of citizens.
This may not be perfect (it’s not open source etc) but it’s a vast improvement over non encrypted data that was openly routinely given to the government.
In any case, selective support for technical proposals based on broader political vibes is not a particularly inspiring stance.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/21/europe/grenoble-france-burkin...
Let's not pretend this is the same thing as kidnapping you and taking you to a reeducation camp because of your religion, leaving your kids alone and confused.
No one claimed that they were being “forced” to be part of a religion. What next? Forcing people to eat pork even if it is against their religion to enforce “secularism”?
This was nothing more than discrimination.
In the US, we had to have laws that allowed Black girls to wear their hair the way they wanted and schools were forcing black girls to straighten their hair to fit in.
People who are forced to wear certain clothes by others in their religion are also often forced to have that religion.
Confusing race with religion is even crazier. We should accommodate people who are physically different, but there is no reason to go out of our way to accommodate people with arbitrarily wacky beliefs and even less reason to go out of our way to accommodate oppression by people with arbitrarily wacky beliefs.
Honestly, every religion is “wacky” to an outside observer.
The secularism rule basically says that the government should not make laws to accommodate one religion because then it would have to make laws to accommodate any and all religions, and there is no limit to how wacky a religion can be.
The law was specifically aimed https://apnews.com/article/religion-france-government-and-po...
> The ruling was the first under a controversial law, championed by President Emmanuel Macron, aimed at protecting “republican values” from what his government calls the threat of religious extremism.
The law passed in the country was set up to disallow laws that favored one religion, but ever since the revolution cast aside Christianity for enlightenment ideals, no such laws had been attempted. It is true that this law was made to prevent laws that favor Islam, but it puts it on equal footing with all other religions. Members of The Native American Church cannot get laws passed to give themselves exemptions to use mescaline.
Very recently in history. China is bad now, European nations have been bad in the past… but who knows what the future holds.
Once data is released (keys, databases, plaintext messages, it doesn’t matter) it can’t be made private later.
https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/new-eu-push-for-enc...
On some level the US could also pass a law that says every iPhone user will be summarily executed. That’s how sovereignty works. Is it a realistic concern? Probably not.
Apple's ecosystem is, by default, design and necessity, insecure to Apple. Keys stored on an Apple device are insecure.
One can easily make a similar argument for Android/Google, however, a security conscious user could still take control over their device and install a more secure OS.